Wednesday, May 06, 2009

2,000-Year-Old Hebrew Scroll Fragment Found

A portion of an ancient papyrus scroll has been recovered from two Palestinian thieves in Jerusalem yesterday. Haaretz reports:

The rare historical document, handwritten in Hebrew on papyrus paper and estimated to be more than 2,000 years old, is a bill surrendering property rights. The document was written by a widow named Miryam Ben Yaakov, and hails from a period in which the people of Israel were exiled from the area and very few Jews remained.

The scroll also, unusually, clearly indicates a precise date on the first line: "Year 4 to the destruction of Israel". The intention is, presumably, either to the year 74 C.E. (the year when the Second Temple was destroyed during the Great Revolt) or to 138 A.D. (the annihilation of the Jewish settlement following the Bar Kokhva revolt).

The Israel Antiquities Authority said on Wednesday that the scroll was an "exceptional archeological document, of the like but a few exist," adding that similar scrolls had been sold worldwide for sums as high as $5-$10 million.